PDC & Fantaseadive

[Aquatrax]

Another trip to Playa and 2 excursions with Jason at Fantaseadive.

First day: We head out about 9:00am, quick boat ride over to Barracuda and Sabalos Reefs. The water is 80 degrees, perfect for the 3/2 suit and the current is light, We descend to 40 fsw, and nice sized turtle comes gliding by. We drift slowly along the edge the the reef, beautiful coral formations and schools of fish everywhere. Jason points out a very small Seahorse (very cool), would never have spotted that on my own! Jason also spotted an octopus hiding in a conch shell and couple of huge green eels. Fantastic way to ease back into the blue water. Tons of color and very little current, definitely “no stress” dives.

Second day is a little more zesty. Time to finish up my AOW so we have Deep, Wreck and Navigation dives on the menu for today. We take off to a reef Jason calls his “Secret Spot”. Time or the Deep dive, a backwards roll and a free descent to 97 fsw, very exciting! While on the bottom doing my math test and observing the effects of pressure, I was waiting to notice some sign of narcosis, If there were any symptoms, I could not tell. After several minutes, we ascend to 60/70 fsw and go sailing over a reef full of brain coral and barrel sponges. Beautiful! We are hanging out at our safety stop when a couple of Marlin come cruising by, good sized ones too!

After a 60 minute s.i, we head over to the Mama Vina wreck. She sits in about 95 fsw and the visibility is 100+ so as soon as we started our drifting descent (due to the current strength) the ship is visible. We spot a southern ray as soon a we arrive at the ship just off the bow. The ship has a lot of coral growth and is an extremely cool beginner wreck. Once we made it to the bow at the upper level, we spot roughly 200 board side jacks coming up behind us, good sized fish. We finish up with exploring the wreck and finish of the tanks by sailing over the nearby reef. Awesome dive.

Another 1 hour s.i. and we are off the Jardines reef for the navigation dives. It’s a shallow reef with light current. Compass work was not difficult as I usually dive in a green quarry with 6ft vis, every dive is a nav dive there! We averaged 30 fsw on this one so we stretched it to around an hour. Saw another sea horse and another ray.

What a fantastic 2 days of diving.

The wife and I stay at a resort in Playacar that has a large dive operator on site but I will continue to use Jason for all my dive trips in PDC. That personal service goes a long way with me.

Now I’m back home with some great memories and no symptoms of swine flu or monkey pox.

Jason should be posting a video soon, should be cool.

thanks for reading

[gee]

Fantastic dives.. Thanks for sharing the story and for not bringing the monkey pox back with you.